Cheater (9 page)

Blaine snorts. “We would never put that kind of pressure on you, Karl. All we ask is the right answers, from now till June.”

“I’ll do my best,” Karl says.

“We can’t ask any more than that.”

Cara strokes the bottom of his foot with the end of her big toe. “Bet you didn’t expect to be here a month ago,” she says.

Good thing Karl’s head is attached to his shoulders. Otherwise it would float away.

Down on the diamond in Blortsmek Park, meanwhile, Lizette has just had the roughest day of her softball career. Though ranked by a scout as one of the five best high school windmill pitchers in the state, she just couldn’t hit the corners today, and it was all Karl’s fault. Early in the game, she saw him heading up the hill; she watched from the mound, between pitches, as Blaine let him in. There just isn’t room in one teenage brain for total game focus
and
preoccupation with a close friend’s suspicious doings. Alone and distracted inside the chalk circle, she went through her routine before the next pitch—deep breath, nose wiggle, right foot shake—but she put the ball in the dirt, which you really don’t want to do with a runner on base, and then (the runner having advanced to second), she couldn’t shake it off, she walked the next two batters, even with the team chattering support and the coach calling out, “Get better, Lizette,” until finally Mr. Rubinoff came out to see what the heck was going on, and she couldn’t say,
I’m worried about my best friend’s soul,
so she just shrugged and popped a piece of Orbit gum in her mouth, her preferred tranquilizer
.
Mr. Rubinoff didn’t give her as hard a time as he might have; he said, “Talk to yourself, Lizette. You’re our inspiration, you’re our engine. You know better than to linger on a bad pitch. Tell yourself:
nothing but strikes.
Get fired up!” And it worked, she put the next ball right over the middle and didn’t give up a grand slam the way she feared, just a high pop-up between second and third, and she crossed the grassless dirt infield for it but didn’t see Sarah Leone, the shortstop, coming in, too, until Mr. Rubinoff screamed,
“CALL IT
,” in response to which both girls shouted, “I got it!” and then collided, and all of the Lincoln Presidents jumped up and down in their blue and black shirts, a team-wide tizzy, as the fluorescent green ball rolled away and two of the Pumas crossed home plate.

Neither girl got hurt—Lizette helped Sarah up, Sarah apologized, and Lizette said, “No, it was my stupid fault” (
really
annoyed at Karl now, blaming him for this whole slapstick humiliation) and this time Mr. Rubinoff just said tersely, “Get in the game, Lizette”—which stung, because no one on the team was ever half as
in the game
as she was, usually.

She got out of the inning by luck, not skill (the last batter swung at a wild pitch), but managed to drive in three runs with a triple, and her attitude settled down after that.

The game’s over now. (The Presidents won, as always.) Lizette loads the bases into the coach’s trunk and turns down her usual ride with Natasha Swenson. The convoy of parent vehicles pulls away from the field as Lizette heads up the hill toward Blaine’s house, alone.

No signs of life come from the enormous stone mansion—except for a laugh in the backyard.

Heading straight up the driveway, she arrives at the palatial rear end of the house, with its terraced hillside, its Egyptian gods holding up globe lights along the tiled stairs, and its border of tall, regularly spaced, skinny poplars.

She pauses in amazement beside the greenhouse and hears Karl say, “My dad was talking about the Nobel Prize at supper last night.”

You’d have to know Lizette even better than her friends know her to understand why Karl’s gentle mockery gives her guts a twist. You see, her mother died when she was in third grade, and her father, a college football coach, has raised her and her brothers by himself ever since. In Lizette’s world, you don’t speak disrespectfully about your father, EVER. And here’s Karl, exposing an embarrassing private conversation with his dad, one of the few people she’s met since moving here from Florida who made her feel welcome, who seemed
happy
his son was friends with her. Suffice it to say that she’s deeply disappointed in Karl.

It gets worse. When she hears Blaine say,
All we ask is the right answers, from now till June,
tears pool in Lizette’s eyes. Not tears of grief—we’re talking anger here. Okay, with a little grief mixed in.

She can’t confront Karl, though. You can’t accuse someone if you can’t stand to look at his face.

After a quick shower, during which Cara calls in teasingly, “Hey, why’d you lock the door?” Karl heads back home—on foot, since Cara has to pick her mother up from work. It’s a mile-and-a-half walk, so he has plenty of time to plan his next move. Tomorrow, at the Lincoln Day Celebration (postponed from Lincoln’s birthday because the painters still hadn’t finished the auditorium), he’ll grab the seat next to Cara’s, and during the pageant, he’ll hold her hand. (Or would she consider that terminally uncool?) Anyway, as the festivities are reaching a climax, he’ll invite her to Café EnJay. That’s the plan—final—no backing out.

Lizette is sitting at the top of his front steps when he gets home. She’s staring at him with a blank face that’s so unlike her, he might not have recognized her without the dirty uniform and the glove.

The cinnamon-colored dirt on her cheek is streaked with drip marks that he hopes are sweat.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

She keeps her voice down. “At first I thought I wouldn’t ever talk to you again, because you’re nothing but slime. Then I thought,
Let him try to talk his way out of it. I’ll listen to his bull, and then I’ll know I was right, he’s a lying disgrace and I can’t be friends with him anymore.
So go ahead—let me hear your excuses. Come on, I’m waiting.”

Confused and alarmed, he assumes this must have something to do with Cara—but he can’t figure out what, exactly.

“What are you talking about?”

“‘All we ask is the right answers, from now till June.’”

Karl has been worrying about this ever since he joined the Confederacy:
what’ll I do if someone catches me?
Interestingly, getting found out doesn’t feel like the end of the world. He tells himself he always knew it would happen.

Still, he can’t look Lizette in the eye.

“How’d you ever get mixed up with them, Karl? I bet they used Cara as bait.
Here, dumb fishy, look at me wiggle.
”

That touches a nerve. Maybe she’s right. Is he the world’s biggest idiot, to believe a word Cara said?

“I thought you were a good person. How could you let them talk you into this?
”

He needs to puff himself up if he’s to defend himself. Annoyed—okay, angry—he says, “Do you think I’m doing it to help myself? Don’t you remember what Klimchock did to Ivan? School is an unfair place—this is just a way of hitting back. It’s like rebelling against a vicious system.”

She stares at him as if he’d recited the Gettysburg Address in Portuguese. “What kind of logic is that? Klimchock’s a mean old crud-head, so you’ll make the world a better place by cheating? That’s like protesting a war by pissing in the reservoir—one thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”

“You’re not listening. The whole system of grades isn’t for our benefit—it’s to sort people out. Some go to Yale, others get to collect the garbage. Is that fair?”

“I can almost see what you’re saying, but—so what? You cheating doesn’t help anybody.”

She’s making him angrier by the second. She doesn’t
want
to understand—and now he can’t remember the words Noah used, which made perfect sense at the time.

“You don’t have to make such a big deal out of it,” he says. “Most people at school cheat, one time or another.”

“Says who?
I
don’t cheat. And till now I didn’t know anyone else who did.”

“Well, it’s going on, whether you know it or not.”

Her big dark eyes won’t let go of him. This isn’t what friends usually do. Usually, friends see things from your point of view and sympathize; they don’t blast you out of the water like a shotgunned duck.

He’d like to go inside and not see her again for a long time—but he can’t, because she’s blocking the way.

“Karl,” she says, and even in the shadow of her visor, he can see her eyes soften, “my dad taught me about cheating a long time ago. You know what he said? He said it’s a matter of pride. He said, ‘I don’t care if it’s moving the ball one more inch away from the wall in minigolf—you don’t cheat. Ever. Because once you open that door, it gets easier and easier to open it again, till you turn into a different person— sneaky and low, never doing the things you’re supposed to do.’ Maybe you think you can’t say no to these people, but you’re wrong. You can.”

She’s watching him like a searchlight. Even though she still hasn’t gotten the point—
he’s not doing this to get ahead unfairly—
explaining again won’t help.

“You gonna say something? Or are you too ashamed to open your mouth?”

Here’s where Karl makes a bad mistake. The second the words leave his lips, he recognizes how stupendously dumb they are, but by then it’s too late.

“Are you going to report us?”

She throws her mitt at his face. He ducks to the side; it cartwheels along the concrete walk behind him.

“You need to face up to what you’re doing, Karl. Look yourself in the eye and be honest about it.”

She stands up. Since she’s on the second step from the top, she towers over him like Moses on the mountain.

“What do you want me to say? That I promise never to do it again and please forgive me?”

“Yeah, that’d be a good start. Just
stop
, Karl. Don’t let her play you like a harmonica. Get a spine!”

He’s never seen Lizette this angry before. It’s frightening: all that passion aimed straight at him, criticizing him, instead of teasing him playfully.

She pushes past him and gives his shoulder a shove. “Don’t talk to me again unless you quit. I’m serious.”

Wait,
he wants to call out, but he can’t say
Wait
unless he also says,
I’ll stop
—and, after this afternoon in the hot tub, he’s not ready to do that.

But what’s this agonized urge to run down the street and physically keep her from leaving? What’s
that
all about?

The blue and black uniform gets smaller and smaller, until she turns the corner and disappears behind Mr. Miyasaki’s pear tree. There’s an odd, acrid scent in his nostrils, which confuses him. Does torment smell?

No, it’s just a leftover trace of funky Clorox.

RULE #7: Sometimes your Plans don’t work out. You steal the test, but the Page gets crumpled UP in the copier’s feeder and the teacher gets suspicious and changes the questions at the last minute. Okay, you screwed up—happens to the best of Us. Don’t give UP! Just make sure you cheat smarter next time. Handle that Page like the original Declaration of Independence. Only losers make the same mistake twice.

Chapter 7

Below the stage, the orchestra tunes up, melodious as a car alarm. The heavy green curtain ruffles, bumped by unseen bodies. Abraham Lincoln peeks out, stage left, shielding her eyes from the lights. (Is that Juliette Chang behind the beard?) Karl is a couple minutes late—locker jam—and he can’t see Cara anywhere. A waving hand from the far right signals him,
Sit here—
it’s Jonah, next to Matt— and Lizette, too, glancing, scowling, looking away.

Karl sweeps the auditorium with his gaze, pretending he didn’t see.

“Sit down,” Miss Verp commands, sweetly smiling. “You’re impeding traffic.”

Crushed and defeated, he slips into an aisle seat. So much for resolutions.

“Mind if I join you?” Cara asks and slips past him, into the seat next to his, leaving a perfumed breeze behind.

“I’m glad you made it, I paid a fortune for these seats,” he ad-libs, thrilled at his own quick wit.

She rubs her arm against his, saying, “Good work, Petrofsky. Keep it up.”

Suddenly, the future is all sunshine.

They murmur discreetly about this and that. Cara comments that Miss Verp has a strange admiration for kings and dictators. Karl says, “I think she wishes the American Revolution turned out the other way.”

The lights go down, the orchestra plays “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and an African-American Abraham Lincoln slips out between the curtains, spotlit. Applause, a few piercing whistles, some jocks chanting, “A-bie! A-bie!”— same as last year, when Jonah commented, “That’s as far as they got in the alphabet”—and then the celebration begins, with reenacted scenes from Lincoln’s life. The outgrown buckskin breeches look hilarious on Brett Handshoe, the basketball player, but the slave mother crying as her babies are sold makes Karl’s heart squeeze, even though the babies are dolls. Cara’s fingertips walk discreetly over the armrest to his leg. “Mind if I visit?” “I’m okay with that.” Her fingers drum on his leg as if to say,
This is so booooooring;
the hand vanishes each time Miss Verp cruises by. When Honest Abe walks three miles to pay back the six cents he overcharged a customer, Cara asks, “Would you do that for me, Karl?” and he answers, “I would walk
six
miles to give you
three
cents. And I’d bring you a cookie.”

He’s quite pleased with himself, and a bit drunk on her perfume—but now comes the hard part, asking her out. There’s Lizette across the auditorium, glaring at him and looking away fast, while a new Lincoln proclaims, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally,” and then comes the Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Malice Toward None and Charity for All speech, and Karl knows his fear is ridiculous, since she’s done everything humanly possible to encourage him, but what if she’s just fooling around, flirting for fun, and she doesn’t really mean it?